Pinter: Poet-Playwright of Peace and Violence

Addressing an anti-war meeting at the House of Commons in 2002 Pinter is reported to have said, ‘‘Bush has said: ‘We will not allow the world’s worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world’s worst leaders’. Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That’s you.’’ In his speech at the Imperial War Museum, in September 2004, he summed the whole issue succinctly: ‘‘Freedom, democracy and liberation. These terms, as enunciated by Bush and Blair essentially mean death, destruction and chaos.’’ This directness is apparent in his recent poetry, which has become increasingly political: ‘‘The bombs go off/ The legs go off/ The heads go off’’ (‘‘The Special Relationship’’); ‘‘There are no more words to be said/ All we have left are the bombs/ Which burst out of our head.’’ (‘‘The Bombs’’) But this poet-actor-playwright-director burst into the theatrical/literary world with a series of plays, beginning with The Birthday Party (1958), that left audiences and critics bewildered. After all he said that there ‘‘are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’’ In what was the beginning of a wonderful period in British theatre, a period which saw the emergence of a number of politically committed playwrights, Pinter’s seemingly realist plays seemed to be oddly apolitical, even anti-political. What was the truth, he seemed to ask, except a much abused word which stood for whatever anyone wanted? In a more recent re-appraisal of his works, he said that he stands by his earlier assertions about the nature of reality as explored through art, but that as ‘‘a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?’’ But, this writer-citizen dualism is a red herring that we have to throw back into the English Channel.

His plays are actually brilliant expressions of power dynamics in all relationships, of the games people play with each other, in and with language as well as without. He skillfully deconstructs our worlds to show us the truth about our codes of behaviour, about our social organizations, and how we impinge on and attempt to colonise each other’s spaces, both physically and linguistically. His plays enact the political structures of every day life, stage the roles that all of us construct, destruct, and re-construct in our quest for control over spaces. He demonstrates how little concern we have for the dignity of other human beings, and how open to manipulation and negotiation are all social positions that we take for granted. The individual can never hold out against society at large. Pinter is the master of form, and of language — of communication through words, silences, acts, and menacing inaction. In The Birthday Party, a character is shown methodically tearing a sheet of newspaper into five equal strips. At the end of the play, when another character opens the newspaper, the strips fall to the floor. In such a simple piece of stage action is shown how a home is no longer a castle, and how there are no safety/escapist devices left anywhere. You can’t hide behind this newspaper — we not only can, we have seen you!

Pinter has thus always been a political playwright — critics then just didn’t know it. But they should have. Born in 1930, too young to fight in World War II, the only war he was willing to concede that he would have participated in (to fight against Germany) in a recent interview on BBC, this son of a Jewish tailor in East London was fined by magistrates in 1949 for having, as a conscientious objector, refused to do his national service. He was willing to go to prison for it. How could his plays have been a-political? His plays shake our belief in our reality and his political speeches of the last two decades do the same. His poetry, which is more direct than his plays, has won him the Wilfred Owen Prize this year. Pinter’s corpus of twenty nine plays (and twenty one screen plays, including the brilliant adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman) is an outstanding achievement, and each play rewards re-reading and re-interpretation.

Pinter is a master of his craft and can play with all our expectations and reactions. I can do no better than end with David Hare’s words: ‘‘Pinter did what Auden said a poet should do. He cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly…. The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected. In sum, this tribute from one writer to another: you never know what the hell’s coming next.’’

The writer, a novelist and critic, teaches literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University. E-mail him at: gjvprasad@yahoo.com